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The phone on my desk buzzes.
I pick it up.
"Line one," my secretary says. "It's General Dwight D. Eisenhower calling for Marlene Dietrich."
I can't help myself. I snort a laugh into the receiver. My secretary laughs back before I press the button blinking green. It's my father calling from Florida. He's in love.
"Hi ya, Junie," he says. "I just wanted you to know I got here all right. The plane food isn't so good anymore, is it? I was so hungry by the time I got here, I said to Lynette, 'Let's eat.' You know she's not much of a cook. Not like your mother. But what do I care. They've got some first-class restaurants down here."
He's talking so fast he's becoming breathless, as if he's in a hurry to get somewhere to do something that just can't wait. It's something I've begun to notice about the old, how they always seem to be in a rush to make it appear they still have big things to do. They want to turn life into a blur. Me, I'm always trying to slow things down, waiting for that instant of sharp focus when time suspends.
"That's good, Dad," I say. "That's fine."
I'm distracted, shuffling through the papers on my desk, looking for a set of specifications. I've got structural drawings due at a fabricator's tomorrow afternoon. My father left yesterday to rejoin his girlfriend in the two-bedroom they now share overlooking a fake lake in Delray. She's 78. He just turned 83.
"So it was a nice flight?" I say.
"Nice? Who said anything about nice, I got here is all. I waited at the luggage for 45 minutes, that's three quarters of an hour. And when the bags, they finally came through, there was a big scuff on my Hartmann, right across the ritzy-pitzy leather. Then getting out of the parking lot. The line. You should have seen it. Anyway, we drove over to that deli on the boulevard in West Palm and had a little lunch. You know Lynette. She eats like a bird, just like a little sparrow or something, a peck here, a nibble there. That's how she keeps her figure. Have I told you Junie, what a nice slim figure Lynette has?"
I feel myself tightening my abs, "Imagine you're squeezing the last drop of water out of a sponge," the aerobics instructor had said this morning before barking her next series of Gestapo commands, "Now give me 16 more. . . ."
"Yes, Dad," I say. "Yes, you have."
You've told me about Lynette's figure about 400 times. I'm trying to keep the phone tucked between my shoulder and my ear. I bend over, still trying to locate the missing measurements in one of the piles of drawings and papers on the floor.
"So after lunch we drove back down the coast to the Club," he continues.
The Club is The Delray Golf and Tennis Club, where Lynette lives in a condo decorated in shades of blue coordinated to match her hair. Dad has a condo there too, but he doesn't live in it anymore. Not since Lynette's husband had his second stroke, and she put him in a nursing home. Now Dad lives with her. They're living in sin.
I haven't forgotten. And I haven't let him forget how scandalized he was when I moved in with Jerry.
"Your reputation will be ruined," he'd warned me. "What will people think?"
"I don't care what people think," I'd said.
I didn't then and I don't now.
How was I to know, that in one of life's more ironic twists, I'd find myself defending him for doing the same thing.
And what did he do?
He nodded off in Lynette's powder blue velvet wing chair.
"What's the big deal?" I'd said to her son and daughter as he snored on the other side of the room. "At their ages, why should they wait?"
Her son agreed. Her daughter, a pinch-faced frump, didn't say anything; instead, she rolled her eyes at her husband, some big shot epidemiologist for the CDC, who made a strange noise in the back of his throat. I'm still not sure if it was disapproval or relief. There had been talk of Lynette moving in with them.
"I suppose it's an acceptable living arrangement, given the circumstances," he'd said.
The circumstances are that after 50 years of an up and down marriage to my
mother and a hellish ten years of caring for her disabled husband,
Lynette and my father have fallen madly in love. Most of the year
now he lives with her in Florida. Every couple of months he flies
up to check out the house he abandoned in Philadelphia and swings
up to spend a few days with me and my kids. I live in another state
altogether, geographically and emotionally, so I don't really care
where he lives as long as he's happy and it's not with me.
I try hard not to think about my father in the context of certain things, things like lingerie, or condoms, or STDs. If you make it to 83, does safe sex become an oxymoron? And the lingerie thing? I try to remember. When was the last time I slept in something other than a T-shirt and sweatpants? The idea of Lynette in some sort of filmy pink nightie edged with maribou, well let's just say, I try not to let myself think about it.
At their ages, how do you start? Do you just jump right in? Or do you take it slowly, a little teasing, a little foreplay, before you go for the big bang? I used to like it slow, liked the feel of slow hands, slow kisses. . . .
My father is still talking.
"When we got back to the Club, Lynette said to me, 'Maybe we should go for a swim.'" The tempo of his voice perks up. "But you know what? I was feeling a little tired, so instead I said, 'Not now. Why don't we take a nap.'"
I think I know what's coming.
No, I pray, please don't.
I'm still bent over, rolling around in my office chair, fumbling with the papers scattered on the floor. There it is. I straighten up just as he begins again.
"Well, you know, Junie," he says like I'm part of some sort of conspiracy. "You know how it is." I think I can hear him winking at me.
No, Dad. I don't know how it is.
In the midst of the half-drained cups of coffee, the trails of Post-it notes, the files in teetering stacks; three faces mounted in a Museum of Modern Art frame stare out at me. Well, not exactly at me. The two boys and the girl each look in different directions, away from the lens of the camera, away from each other. They're posed, and it looks forced, as if they're poised to bolt from the scene the instant the shutter snaps.
The taller boy lives with Jerry's face, the younger one's head is shaved and a row of hoops crawl up his ear. The girl, my little girl, looks sullen, but there's no denying her beauty. The face is a perfect heart, the eyes wide-set gray-blue almonds. Her face is Brad's, not mine.
No, I don't know how it is, not since things fell apart with Brad.
How long ago was that? Two years? That long already?
I still haven't told my father that Jerry tried to sue me for more alimony last year. I didn't tell him about that, didn't tell him how the judge just looked Jerry up and down and ordered a psychiatric evaluation on him. I never said a word. Ten minutes was all it took the judge to figure it out. It took me 15 years.
And number two? Well, Brad can't afford child support, but somehow he can scrape together enough to spend the winters in Jamaica. At least he calls Kitty every Sunday, sends a postcard now and then, painted parrots, turquoise waters, cloudless skies as our winter grinds on.
As for me, since it ended with Brad, I've been alone. Can't get myself out of the house to go looking. The upside? No worries about letting someone touch me. Well, I won't even go into that. No, Dad. Honestly, I don't know how it is.
I spread the drawings out in front of me, flatten the mangled sheet of measurements that was caught under the leg of my chair, and start checking the dimensions for a four-hundred-thousand-dollar trade show booth. At least I can pay my own bills.
"So you decided to take a nap instead of going for a swim," I say.
Why am I baiting him? I could change the subject. I could ask him, "What did you have for lunch?"
"You know, Junie, we always start out in our own beds. Then somehow one or the other of us creeps over. Creeps over to curl right up with the other one."
My pencil point breaks.
When was it? Not long after Mom died. It was just after he told me what the doctor had told him, "Alzheimer's, it'll take about a year before it starts to get really bad."
All I kept thinking was how terrible, something with such a German sounding name was going to be the end of him. He'd escaped the Germans once; now they were going to get him, after all. But it wasn't the end of him. It was more like a rebirth. My straightlaced father morphed into a dirty old man.
He'd wanted to go to the drugstore. For cigars or was it toothpaste? I turned around, just for a minute. He disappeared. I found him outside at the newsstand leafing through a Penthouse magazine.
"What the hell are you doing," I screamed.
"Haven't you ever seen one of these before," he said flashing a double page spread at me.
That night I said to my sons, "I think your grandfather is starting to lose it."
"Or just starting to get it," the younger one smirked.
"He's not really getting any worse," I'd told the neurologist the next day. "He's still himself just more so. His checkbook is balanced, his twinkle is still there, but he's different somehow. Looser."
"It could be we misdiagnosed. It happens sometimes, the symptoms look like one thing then turn out to have been depression, or in your father's case, since he's had no history of depression, more likely TIAs."
"TI whats?" I'd asked.
"Little strokes. Tiny blood vessels bursting in the brain causing subtle changes, a loosening of inhibitions, atypical behaviors. . . ."
Before he could finish I found myself thinking, 'Lucky him.'
Smack in the middle of my life, when I'm losing the battle to keep extra lumps and bumps from piling on, to keep my tits from hanging down to my waist, my father is getting a good run in at the end of his thanks to a minefield of mini-bombs going off inside his head.
Last week, when he was up staying with me, I made him dinner, one of his favorites, chicken and rice just the way Mom used to make it, and we talked. The kids were all off somewhere, it was just the two of us, and he started in, his usual litany of "it's never too late, just look at me, who would have thought. You just have to learn how to be more discriminating." The whole time he was wagging his gnarly finger. When he said, "I'll bet I could teach you a thing or two . . ." I got out of my chair, turned up the volume on La Traviata until I could feel Domingo's heartbroken Alfredo vibrating the floorboards, and I served the dessert. He ate his slice of cherry cheesecake right down to the plate.
I wanted to ask him to teach me what it takes to make love stick. How did he do it with Mom for all those years, and now? How does he do it? If he can, at his age, why can't I? I'm two for two. Who's to blame? I picked them, both of them. In the end I didn't ask him anything. I cleared the dishes and brewed him a cup of coffee, decaf of course.
I turn my attention back to the phone. He's still droning on.
"You know, Junie," my father is saying, his voice softer, suddenly far away, "After all those years of thinking there are certain things that don't work anymore, that there are certain parts that won't know what to do. Well, let me tell you. . . ."
Slowly I move the receiver away from my ear. I set it back on its cradle.
I put my fingers to my temples, gently massaging them until I'm centered
again. I refocus on the drawings in front of me. The measurements
are OK. I'll need to recheck the color boards. When's the last FedEx
pickup? Six-thirty. I'll make it. By the time I get home, Kitty will
have eaten. She'll be holed up in her room listening to some lovelorn
Latino pretty boy. All I'll be able to make out is the thump of the
bass. The boys will be at basketball practice. There's a stack of
Lean Cuisines in the freezer. Maybe I'll pick up a video—or no
. . . maybe I'll eat out, go over to the Rumline to listen
to some jazz, dance a little. Who knows? Maybe there'll be someone. . . .
The phone buzzes. I lift the receiver.
"It's Ed Sullivan on line two. Says the phones aren't what they used to be. He says he was disconnected from Ethel Merman, that he was cut off. He's a real comedian. 'Unceremoniously' is the word he used. He says it's the phone company's fault. He was 'unceremoniously' cut off from you."
I push the button, the one that's blink, blink, blinking green.
"Hi, Ed," I say, "It's me. Ethel. Sorry about that."
"I forgive you," the voice from Florida says. "You want to know why?"
"Yes, Dad," I say, "I suppose I do."
"Because I'm your father," he says. "I have to."
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